Books by Martin Halliwell

Therapeutic Revolutions examines the evolving relationship between American medicine, psychiatry, and culture from World War II to the dawn of the 1970s. In this richly layered intellectual history, Martin Halliwell ranges from national politics, public reports, and health care debates to the ways in which film, literature, and the mass media provided cultural channels for shaping and challenging preconceptions about health and illness.

Traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing particularly on visual images, and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Conrad, Steinbeck and Mistry, and filmmakers such as Kurosawa, Herzog and Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures.

The book focuses on the thought of twenty-four mainly European and North American thinkers, ranging historically from the Renaissance to postmodernism.

This book provides a stimulating account of the dominant cultural forms of 1950s America: fiction and poetry; theatre and performance; film and television; music and radio; and the visual arts. Through detailed commentary and focused case studies of influential texts and events - from Invisible Man to West Side Story, from Disneyland to the Seattle World's Fair, from Rear Window to The Americans - the book examines the way in which modernism and the cold war offer two frames of reference for understanding the trajectory of postwar culture. The two core aims of this volume are to chart the changing complexion of American culture in the years following World War II and to provide readers with a critical investigation of 'the 1950s'. The book provides an intellectual context for approaching 1950s American culture and considers the historical impact of the decade on recent social and cultural developments.